re: #197 Charleston Chew

No.

The danger from the operation of a coal plant is constant with respect to the amount of fuel burned. Burning 100 tons of coal in one year is 10 times worse than burning 10 tons in one year, but about the same as burning 10 tons per year for ten years. To figure out the total damage a coal plant has done you can simply multiply the fuel burned by some constant (depending on the breadth of your model there may be some damping factors involved, like forests).

In contrast the current danger from any nuclear reactor is a function of the amount of fuel used in the past, the time since the fuel was taken out of the reactor plus the amount of current fuel being used. A nuclear reactor that uses 10 tons of fuel per year for 10 years is more dangerous in year 10 than in year 1.

The crucial fact that you don’t seem to be getting is that there is no long term way to assure the safety of nuclear fuel. For the time scales being discussed for nuclear fuel (100+ years of high danger followed by 1000+ years of low danger), any catastrophe with a chance greater than 1% per year can be assumed to threaten the nuclear fuel. The cannot be said of coal.